How lovely it must be, Anne thought wistfully, to belong to a large, close-knit, boisterous family. How lovely for the children.

“School has finished for the year, Miss Jewell?” Lady Potford asked.

“Most of the girls went home yesterday, ma’am,” Anne told her.

“And will you be going home too?” Lady Potford asked.

“No, ma’am,” Anne said. “I will remain at the school. Miss Martin takes in charity pupils as well as paying ones, and they must be cared for through the holidays.”

Of course, there was no need for Claudia, Susanna, and Anne all to remain. But none of them had anywhere else to go unless their close friend Frances Marshall, Countess of Edgecombe, a former teacher at the school, arrived home from the Continent, where she had gone with the earl on a singing tour, and invited one of them to Barclay Court in Somersetshire, as she often did whenever she was at home during a school holiday.

“You still have not been home, then, Anne?” Joshua asked.

“No,” she said.

Not since the year before David was born-more than ten years ago now. It was a long time. She had been only nineteen then, her sister Sarah, seventeen. Matthew, their brother, now a clergyman, a mere twenty-year-old, had still been up at Oxford. Henry Arnold had just turned twenty at that time too-she had been home for his birthday. They had spoken of his coming-of-age birthday the following year, and she had felt no premonition at all of the fact that she would not be there for that occasion-or ever see him again, in fact.

“We have a request to make of you, Anne,” Joshua said.

“Oh?” Anne looked from him to Lady Hallmere and back again.

“I am increasingly aware,” Joshua said with a sigh, “that David is my blood relative, Anne, my cousin.”

“No!” Anne stiffened. “He is my son.”